Posted every Monday at 9:00 am PST,
or more often if I get around to it...

Monday, December 7, 2015

My favorite noodles: dandan mian

This
is probably the one thing I could eat every day for a week and still want more:
Dandan Noodles. A creamy, crunchy, soft, crisp, nutty, spice-flecked, tart,
sweet, and savory sauce coats each strand with luscious flavor. It’s like a
whole spectrum of things for the mouth to play with.

My
gold standard for this dish was made at a small stand in Qing Guang Market, a
warren of tiny dark alleys off of Chongqing North Road in Taipei. I’d get off
at the bus stop there as often as I could manage and make a beeline for Caves
Bookstore, which had shelves full of pirated English language books. They had
classics, modern bestsellers, and shelves full of weird titles that always made
me wonder who in their right mind would ever pick them up, much less write
them. I still have my first hardback copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Claiborne's New York Times cookbook, and The Joy of Cooking more for sentimental reasons than anything else, as I read those so many times in those incarnations that I could never bear giving them up. In spite of that, those reproductions were really bad – just lousy photocopies that turned
any illustrations into mud – but it was just about the only way to get anything
to read in English at that time, so I was a regular customer.

Homemade chile sauce - always a great idea

One
day I had the pleasure of squiring the former director of New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art around town as his interpreter, as he was the guest
of the National Museum of History where I worked. I told the elegant Mr. Thomas
Hoving how much I’d loved his books, particularly King of the Confessors, which had just come out. Bad idea. He asked me
where I possibly could have gotten ahold of it in such a short period of time, and I joyfully admitted to having bought an illegal copy. I offered to
give it to him as a sort of weird memento of his trip to the pirated book
capital of the world, but Mr. Hoving looked determinedly out the window, the air in the cab dropped around 30 degrees, and we spent the rest of the ride in a strained silence. I shelved my idea of asking him for a job at the Met.

Sichuan hot bean sauce

Anyway,
back to the noodles. This lady in the market made the best version I’ve ever
tasted, and I’ve worked hard over the years to reproduce it. You of course can
play with the ratios as much as you like, particularly since things like chile
oil and goop, soy sauce, peanut butter, vinegar, and all the other condiments
have a wide range of flavors, and also because our mouths are just so
different. What this means in the short run is that what makes me thrilled to
the core might seem less than perfect to you. And so you should feel free to
make this dish your very own.

So
here, without more ado, is my personal recipe for what I think are now the best
Dandan Noodles in the world:

Dandan noodles

Dàndàn miàn擔擔麵

Sichuan

Serves 2 to 4 as either a main meal or generous side dish

Meat:

2 tablespoons chile oil plus 1 tablespoon of the
goop (if you like it spicy), or else use 2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

8 ounces ground fatty meat (pork, beef, chicken, or turkey)

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 tablespoons Sichuan fermented hot bean sauce (la doubanjiang)

¼ cup chopped Sichuan pickles (see Tips)

2 tablespoons mild rice wine (Taiwan Mijiu)

1 tablespoon regular soy sauce

1 teaspoon sugar

Sauce:

2 tablespoons toasted sesame paste

2 tablespoons nut butter (peanut butter, almond butter, etc.)

About 1/2 cup hot water

2 tablespoons black vinegar

The crunchy garnish

1 tablespoon sugar

Noodles:

2 quarts boiling water

1 pound dried noodles of some sort (thick or thin,
wheat or rice, white or wholegrain, whatever); I prefer very thin wheat pasta here, like capellini

1. This dish can be made ahead of time up through
Step 2; refrigerate the meat and sauce if you are not using them right away.
Place a wok over medium-high heat, and as soon as it is hot, swirl the oil
around inside to coat the iron. Add the goop and ground meat to the oil and break it up
with your spatula. As it starts to turn from pink to gray, sprinkle in the
garlic and toss these together over the heat until the meat is about half
browned. Scoot the meat and garlic up the sides of the wok so that the oil
dribbles back down to the bottom before adding the bean sauce to the oil. Stir
this around over the heat to cook it through, and then toss in the pickles,
rice wine, soy sauce, and sugar. Quickly boil the seasonings down to a thick
syrup, toss the meat with it, and then scrape it into a small work bowl.

2. To make the sauce, rinse out the wok and set it
over medium heat. Mix the sesame paste and peanut butter in the wok with just
enough hot water so that they smooth out and have the texture of sour cream.
Add the rest of the sauce ingredients, bring it to a boil, and then toss in the
meat mixture. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding whatever you think it
needs, be it more peanut butter, chile oil or goop, vinegar, etc. Remove the
wok from the heat.

3. About 10 minutes before serving, bring the pot
of water to a full boil and add the dried noodles. Stir the noodles as the
water comes back to a boil so that they do not stick together. Simmer the
noodles according to package directions, or until done to your liking.

4. Toss the drained noodles (reserve a cup or so of
the pasta water) in the wok with the hot sauce. Then, divide the noodles
between two large soup bowls and reserve the pasta water. Add about ¼ cup of
the boiling pasta water to each bowl (more if you like the noodles soupier), and sprinkle the tops of the bowls with
the peanuts, sesame seeds, and green onions. Arrange some blanched greens or the cucumber on the edge of the
noodles. Serve and eat immediately, adding more hot pasta water to your noodles
if they start to get dry.

Yibin city's famous yacai

Tips

The traditional pickle for this dish is from
Sichuan and is known as yácài芽菜, which is yet another type of pickled mustard
leaf. Because beansprouts are sometimes called yacai, most people refer to this pickle as Sìchuān yácài四川芽菜 (after the province) or 宜賓芽菜Yíbīn yácài (after the town most connected to
this seasoning). Yacai has a nice
crunch to it and, to my mouth at least, has a more delicate range of flavors to
it that works especially well in dishes like this one. If you look at the last photo here, you can see another reason why this pickle is so tasty: it's bathed in a rich soy sauce that gives it all sorts of deep flavors.

A tangle of yacai

The other standby pickle
is Sichuan pickled tuber (zhàcài榨菜), which provides a relatively one-note saltiness. However, the tuber is much more common in markets (find it in sealed plastic
bags, in cans, even in open bins at times), and so use what you have here.My husband loves this topped with a fried egg or two. Just saying.

No comments:

Post a Comment

"Good Graces" named one of The Atlantic's "Exceptional Works of Journalism" for 2017.

Over 6 million views and counting... Me in Sichuan, July 2017: The caption on this website literally says, "American old lady creates beautiful Sichuan dishes and spent 10 years writing a Chinese cookbook." Shoot me now.